Current specifications, systems, and/or methods (e.g., LTE specifications, systems, and/or methods) may be targeted to support a wide range of deployments in terms of cell sizes, environments, and/or device speeds. As such, the physical layer may not be designed to take advantage of specific channel characteristics of the small cell environment thereby resulting in several limitations focusing on the downlink. For example, the current system may not support modulations of higher order than 64-QAM in the downlink. As such, the spectrum efficiency of a device located close to a small cell base station may be limited compared to what may be possible based on its signal-to-noise-plus-interference ratio. Additionally, the potential system throughput gains of small cells may not be attainable if resources may be consumed by overhead where such overhead may include resources used up by control signaling such as PDCCH or E-PDCCH, resources used up by physical signals not carrying information such as DM-RS, resource wasted when the minimum resource allocation unit for a UE may be larger than what may be needed, and the like. This may be a problem even if the bandwidth available to the small cell layer may be relatively large, because in a small cell cluster high signal-to-interference ratios may involve some form of frequency reuse (e.g., either through ICIC or some static mechanism) that may reduce the bandwidth available to each cell.